This slight satiric wigging, this Ladies Almanack, anonymously written (in an idle hour), fearfully punctuated, and privately printed (in the twenties) by Darantière at Dijon; illustrated, with apologies to ancient chapbooks, broadsheets, and Images Populaires; sometimes coloured by the mudlark of the bankside and gamine of the quai; hawked about the faubourg and the temple, and sold, for a penny, to the people, cherished by de Gaulle as “the indolent and terrible.”
That chronicle is now set before the compound public eye.
Neap-tide to the Proustian chronicle, gleanings from the shores of Mytilene, glimpses of its novitiates, its rising “saints” and “priestesses,” and thereon to such aptitude and insouciance that they took to gaming and to swapping that “other” of the mystery, the anomaly that calls the hidden name. That, affronted, eats its shadow.
It might be well to honour the creature slowly, that you may afford it.
Djuna Barnes
August 1972